June 15, 2014

Today was fairly laid back. Not a lot going on. I slept in, making up for my lack of sleep Saturday night and then spent most of my day watching World Cup games. I missed the first half hour of the first game because when I woke up the cable and internet were out, courtesy of a storm in the middle of the night. I was vaguely aware of the storm because a little before two o'clock in the morning the wind sounded crazy outside. I planned on calling the cable company, just to let them know, and I got halfway through dialing the number before trying to reset my DVR and modem just to see if that would work. The first time the DVR seemed to get stuck so I did it again and the cable came back on. It was completely unrelated to me messing with things, just a coincidence, but I was glad everything was working again so I could get back to the World Cup.

In the game with France v. Honduras, one of the French players scored three goals but I think he'll only get credit for the first and third, with the second going to the goalkeeper for Honduras as an own-goal. The game I was looking forward to was Argentina v. Bosnia and Herzegovina because it is just fun to watch Lionel Messi. For one, he's short so when he runs it just looks faster because his strides are so short. I think this actually lends to his ability to stay on his feet because his center of gravity stays fairly... centered. And that is another thing I like about watching him play, he stays on his feet and keeps the ball until he is physically taken down by another player. He doesn't catch the presence of an opposing player and fall on the ground. He will jump over outstretched feet and bounce off players and just keep going. I hate when players dive and I don't think I have ever seen Messi take a dive. And lastly, he's just really good at what he does. It's like watching an amazing musician or artist, he makes it look easy. In the game today, he had several opportunities to score but passed the ball at the last minute to a teammate that should have had a better shot on goal, but they never scored. Finally, he took the ball all the way and scored is second World Cup goal, putting Argentina up by two. The first goal was an own-goal off a Honduran defender.

This year they have made a big deal about the new goal-line technology that allows you to see whether or not the ball fully crosses the line of the goal. I thought they had that at the last World Cup but maybe it wasn't very accurate. All I know is that in the past there was a lot of guess work because the ball has to completely cross the line and balls are small on the bottom than they are in the middle, so maybe all of the bottom when in but a sliver of the side is still touching the line. It is hard to see a sliver. In the first few matches they had no reason to use the technology because all the goals were hitting the back of the net, and the commentators mentioned this fact, but I guess a lot of money was spent on the technology so they used it anyway. In the French game today the technology finally came in handy with the own-goal. The goalkeeper fumbled it on the line and from almost every replay angle it looked like maybe the ball was still touching the line by just a tiny bit. The fancy technology showed otherwise and the ball had gone over the line by a fraction of an inch. The Honduran coach wasn't very happy.

While I was watching the World Cup games, I read about library stuff. I got off on some tangents, finding various blogs, but I do feel like I gained some important information. I added some more questions to my list of ones I want to ask and tomorrow I want to go over those and refine them a bit. I also want to spent time tomorrow coming up with decent answers to potential questions they may ask me. I'll have a lot of time at work and after to think about those.